A Tale of Two Conans

The new Conan the Barbarian (Marcus Nispel, 2011) is symptomatic of a problematic desire in Hollywood of recent years – the unnecessary remake (although Conan hides under the guise of a reboot). The next few years are going to see remakes of Total Recall, Robocop, Starship Troopers, The Crow, Highlander, and Carrie to just name a few. Remakes are, of course, nothing new. When cinema went from Silent to Sound many movies were remade to take advantage of new technology, the same with colour. Some of our most loved movies are, in fact remakes or re-adaptations, such as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). The Maltese Falcon is a great example of a good remake, a film that improves on, or at least does something different, to the original. There are others, the various versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are all worth a look. The latter Thomas Crown Affair improves markedly on the original. Give me John Carpenter’s The Thing over the original any day (but spare us the recent redundant re-boot). But many of the recent remakes/reboots/re-imaginings are marked by their lack of thought, logic and craft – it really feels as if these are simply exercises in remarketing a name.

And so we come to the new Conan. I’m a fan of the 1982 original, although I’m aware it has flaws. On its side, however, are two major pluses. Arnie and a lean, simple, story. This is, after all, a type of mythological construct – a classic revenge narrative. Conan himself, as represented by Arnie’s ridiculously big body, is less a character and more an archetype. The director, John Milius, gives the film a grand scale, barren vistas suggesting a world related to, but also disconnected from, ours. There’s some wonderful economy of storytelling, the best being the fade from young Conan to Arnie. One edit and one look from the hero communicates aptly the character’s nature and indomitability. It takes the new film about 20 minutes to try to do the same. New Conan has a reasonable star, Jason Momoa; he fits the look and moves well. Sadly he’s surrounded by idiocy. Whereas the first film conjured up epic space, everywhere in the new Hyborian Age is reached by riding a horse for a day. Although there are huge crowd scenes, we never get a sense of scale. And logic has gone missing. For some unknown reason the villain lives in a boat carried by elephants. Barrels of tar explode. In one particularly annoying scene Conan, and an ally, fight their way through a building only to find that everyone has left – the whole scene is redundant. The villain’s quest, for an evil face-hugger helmet that gives magic power, is utterly undone by the fact that when he gets the helmet he does nothing with it. CGI is used extensively and unnecessarily – it simply makes the action ridiculous and thoughts of gravity become dismissed. It cost $90million. The original cost $20million; yet somehow the original feels like the bigger movie – probably because the film-makers understood that sometimes less is more.

The New Conan’s box office failure, taking about $48million, is a lesson. Understand the original before you remake – and only remake if you can bring something fresh to the original. Can something new be said? Or is it just the hope that brand recognition will bring in the cash? Sure Hollywood is an industry, but it doesn’t have to be a stupid one.